JDR’s Newsletter – #11

This is a (roughly) weekly newsletter experiment containing links to things I’ve written and made, plus links to other interesting articles, reports and essays I’ve come across.

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Thoughts, opinions and typos are my own.

My blog posts and articles

I had the week off from Mattermark and had some pressing things to work on last week, so I didn’t get a chance to publish anything new. In light of the recent coup attempt in Turkey, I thought it’s worth revisiting a couple of posts from May 2015.

Here, I perform a brief survey of subversive technologies and design patterns that can be implemented in software. In addition to providing brief explanations of patterns and techniques like decentralized systems architecture, end to end encryption, and ephemerality / “forgetful systems”, I provide links to additional reading materials about each topic and explore how each of these components are mixed and remixed in the software used by protest movements.

This was originally submitted a paper for a college class, but I adopted it for my blog. I compared the kinds of software tools used in post-Arab Spring protest movements. My thesis was that in comparatively repressive regimes or in situations where the right to free speech is not protected, protesters will turn to private and decentralized messaging apps to organize as a pre-emptive hack around government surveillance, whereas in countries with strong free-speech protections, public platforms are the primary medium of organization. I covered the use of Facebook and Twitter in the Ferguson, MO riots and the use of meshnet app Firechat in the Hong Kong protests of 2014.

The Real Reason Why Line’s IPO is Interesting

Japanese messaging application company Line went public on Friday in both US and Japanese markets. The IPO was deemed a major success by the media, closing 27% higher than its IPO price in US trading, and raising some $1.3 billion for the company.

It seems like good news all around: Line shareholders get the liquidity event they wanted, tech investors and private company CFOs have some confidence that the market for tech IPOs is getting better, and, importantly, journalists and researchers will (hopefully) get a better look at the economics of running a large messaging platform.

Tencent’s WeChat, Facebook’s Messenger, and (to a much lesser extent) Apple’s iMessage are revenue-generating products produced by publicly traded companies. But, each platform’s parent company tends to keep revenue figures close to the chest and aggregated with other revenue figures in their balance sheets and income statements. Line, a standalone messaging application, doesn’t necessarily have the luxury of other product verticals to hide behind.

As we could see in Line’s F–1 filing with the SEC, there was a fair bit of granularity in the list of operating expenses. And, one could hope that subsequent income statements break out Line’s revenue streams a bit more, such that analysts can get a better grasp on Line’s performance and that of the mobile messaging market as a whole.

Other news and links

Best Of

If you are in San Francisco, or if you’re a fan of beautiful food photography, design thought and Marshall McLuhan puns, check out The Message is Medium Rate. Do not do so if you’re hungry.

Try your first meeting with the AI VC. Its programmer(s) really hit it right on the nose here.

After a 7,000 km trek through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan’s GBAO region and China’s western provinces, Jan Chipchase shares “61 Glimpses of the future” he experienced on the trek. It’s full of observations and short anecdotes like, “You can comfortably travel here for a month, on one month’s San Francisco rent,” “Pretentious people are inherently less curious,” and “The first time you confront a leader, never do it in front of their followers, they’ll have no way to back down.”

According to Slice Intelligence, purchases in Pokemon Go surpassed he rest of the mobile gaming market on July 10, 2016 and accounted for nearly 47% of the entire mobile gaming market on that same day.

On that note, The Economist published a new report on the state of dark web cryptomarkets.

Go Fish Digital shares some new Snapchat stats. My favorites: Snapchat’s mobile bandwidth usage now exceeds Twitter. And, 37% of college-aged users claim to use the app for “creativity”. Comparatively, 27% and 23% of those surveyed use it for “keeping in touch” and because “it’s easier than texting”.